Great Ideas: Intellectual Foundations of the West
The Great Ideas curriculum explores the ideas of some of the best
minds of Western thought such as Homer, Plato, Vergil, Augustine,
Aquinas, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, and Austen. Through careful reading
of great literary, philosophical, scientific, and religious texts,
students come to grips with the fundamental and immediately relevant
questions they raise: What is love? What is justice? What is the best
way of life? What is the physical world? What is knowledge and how do
we come to know things? What is faith and what does faith demand?
What is happiness? In class, students will grapple with the different
and often opposing answers the texts contain in order to clarify,
reflect upon, and further develop their own understandings. Students
will begin to shape their own responses to these and other questions
that necessarily occupy responsible and thoughtful human beings and
citizens.
The Great Ideas curriculum introduces students to a broad range of
texts while also permitting intense study of certain texts over an
extended period of time. As they encounter some of the richest and
most challenging texts ever written, students will become proficient
at analyzing complex ideas and arguments, at comparing the texts to
each other, and at writing and speaking about them clearly and
effectively.
